Helene Berr was a student of English Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 with her mother and father, and she died in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, just a few weeks before the liberation of the camp.
David Bellos was the first winner of the Man Booker International Translator's Award for his translations of the Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare. He is the translator of, among others, Georges Perec, Romain Gary and Fred Vargas, and he has also written the award-winning biographies of Georges Perec, Romain Gary and Jaques Tati. He is professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he also directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. His irreverent survey of the field of translation, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? will appear in September 2011 with Penguin Books in the UK and Faber and Faber in the USA.